No. 5, 1948 (1948) Private Collection.
By Jackson Pollock. One of thegreatest 20th century paintings
of
the Abstract Expressionist school.
Bought for $1,500 it is now reputed to
be worth in the region of $140 million.

"Abstract Expressionism" is a
vague term which refers to a general movement of largely non-representative
painting, which flourished in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s.
Spearheaded by a generation of American artists - strongly influenced
by European expatriates - who had grown up during the Depression and were
influenced both by World War II and its Cold War aftermath, abstract
expressionist painting was neither wholly abstract
nor expressionist and encompassed several
quite different styles. Even so, the diverse exponents of Abstract Expressionism
had several aims in common, not least a desire to redefine the nature
of painting and in the process create a new type
of art.

The term "Abstract Expressionism"
was initially coined in Europe to describe works by German
Expressionist painters. Only later, in 1946, was it applied to American
art by the art critic Robert Coates. An alternative label, "Action
Painting", was coined in 1952 by Harold
Rosenberg (1906-78) who, along with Clement
Greenberg (1909-94), was the most influential critic and apologist
of the new movement, which became known also as "The New
York School." By 1955, Abstract Expressionism had become almost
a new orthodoxy. Meanwhile, parallel movements in Western Europe were
appearing under various titles, such as Art Informel (c.1945-60),
along with sub-variants such as Lyrical Abstraction (late 1940s, 1950s),
Tachisme (c.1945-60) and the COBRA group (1948-51). In Eastern
Europe Art Informel was regarded as an expression of fervent individualism
and Communist authorities rejected it entirely.

The America of the 1940s, from which Abstract
Expressionism emerged, was still reeling from the collapse of world order
triggered by World War II. This was a major influence on the country's
artists - many of whom still remembered The Great Depression and its relief
programs like the Works Progress Administration which had afforded them
the opportunity to develop a painting career, and they began searching
for ways of responding to the uncertain climate.

The problem was that the two main art movements
of the 1930s - namely, Regionalism and Social Realism -
failed to satisfy their desire for a break with current thinking. In this,
they were strongly influenced by the arrival of numerous modern artist
refugees from Europe, whose radical approach to art opened up a series
of new possibilities.

These exiles included figures like the
Armenian-born Arshile Gorky, who settled in the US in 1920, and
the German-born Hans Hofmann who migrated to America in 1930, as
well as the German Expressionist George Grosz (1893-1959), the Cubist
Fernand Leger (1881-1955), the Bauhaus abstract painter Josef Albers
(1888-1976) and the geometrical abstractionist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).
Other influential immigrants were the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968),
and the Surrealists Yves Tanguy
(1900-55), Andre Masson
(1896-1987), Max Ernst (1891-1976)
and Andre Breton (1896-1966).
The Surrealist artists were especially influential,
with their idea of unconscious 'automatic' painting which was taken up
by Jackson Pollock and others. See also: History
of Expressionist Painting (c.1880-1930).

The significance of these artists for the
new American movement was acknowledged as early as 1944 by Jackson Pollock
himself: "The fact that good European Moderns are now here is very
important for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of
modern painting."

The exchange of ideas was assisted in New
York by a growing infrastructure of venues and exhibitions promoting modern
art, such as The Museum of Modern Art (founded 1929) which hosted
exhibitions of Cubism, various other styles of abstract art, Dada, Fantastic
Art and Surrealism, along with retrospectives of Leger, Henri Matisse,
and Pablo Picasso, among others. Works by Gabo, Mondrian, El Lissitzky,
and other avant-garde artists were also shown at Albert Gallatin's Museum
of Living Art. Another venue was the Museum of Non-Objective Painting
(founded 1939), the forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which
was noted for its collection of paintings by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944).
The themes and ideas of European modernism were also disseminated through
education. The German artist immigrant Hans Hofmann became a huge influence
on painters, critics and the development of American modern art through
his New York art school where he taught from 1933 until 1958. Lastly,
one should not underestimate the role of art
critics as well as wealthy patrons and collectors - notably Peggy
Guggenheim (1898-1979), and Leo
Castelli (1907-99) - who were active agents for the new movement.
See also: Art Museums in America.

Key Figures in
the Development of Abstract Expressionism

Among indigenous painters, Albert
Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) is seen as an early precursor of expressionist
abstraction. In addition, a key transitional figure linking pre-war with
post-war American art was Stuart
Davis (1894-1964), who brought a focused integrity to his pursuit
of pictorial structure. (In a curious parallel with George Stubbs' months-long
study of horse carcasses in order to improve his knowledge of equine anatomy
Davis closeted himself for a long period in 1927 to study an egg beater).
His contribution can be seen as an American extension of Cubism: he was
at times close to Fernand Leger, but he used colour very differently,
bright and clear, solid and flat. This together with his conspicious modernity,
his use of the banal vocabulary of everyday urban life, was a decisive
influence on artists of the 1940s and 1950s and then on Pop Art. Also
significant were the Precisionists, a loosely unified group who
portrayed contemporary America in a hard-edged, boldly coloured version
of Cubism. For a time they included Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), who
in a long career developed an increasingly abstract imagery, based on
magnified organic forms and the rolling windswept plains of Texas.

But the two main forerunners of Abstract
Expressionism were Arshile
Gorky (1905-48) and Hans
Hofmann (1880-1966), neither of whom were connected with the early
expressionist movement in Germany.
Gorky by 1942 had arrived at a very free, calligraphic brushwork, very
bright in colour, often entirely without figurative reference. "I
never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for a while."
Hofmann established a profoundly influencial school in New York where
he not only provided a forcefully articulated theoretical support for
non-figurative art, but remained very open to the stimulous of the new.
In particular he reflected symbolist ideas of the independence of the
world of art from the world of appearances: he used colour to express
mood as Kandinsky had, yet retained a feeling for structure that derives
from Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Cubism. Anticipating Pollock, he even
experimented with "drip" techniques in 1940, but his own most
magical colouristic inventions, coming at the end of his life, express
a radiant serenity very different from anything Pollock produced. Among
Hofmann's acolytes was the art critic Clement Greenberg, a vigorous advocate
of Abstract Expressionism, and among his students was the artist Lee Krasner
who introduced Hofmann to her husband Jackson Pollock.

Characteristics:
The Two Styles

In simple terms, the Abstract Expressionism
movement encompassed two broad groupings. These included: (1) the so-called
"action painters" such as Jackson Pollock and
Willem De Kooning who focused on an intensely expressive style
of gestural painting;
and (2) the more passive "colour-field" painters, notably
Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, who
were concerned with reflection and mood. That said, it is not always easy
to draw a precise line between these two types of Abstract Expressionism,
and several artists contributed to both.

Action
Painting

In 1947, after producing numerous "all-over"
abstract paintings - see, for instance, Pasiphae
(1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art) - Jackson
Pollock, supported by his wife Lee
Krasner (1908-84), developed a radical new technique (one that
both Hofmann and Krasner had tried earlier) called "action-painting",
which involved dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground
using wide and rhythmic sweeps of a large and loaded brush (if a brush
was used) or, more usually direct from the can - a far cry from the traditional
painterly method whereby pigment was applied by brush to a canvas on an
easel. Pollock worked in a highly spontaneous improvisatory manner, famously
dancing around the canvas pouring, throwing and dripping paint onto it.
By doing this, he claimed to be channelling his inner impulses directly
onto the canvas, in a form of automatic or subconscious painting. For
more details, see Jackson
Pollock's paintings (1940-56).

Pollock's paintings smashed all conventions
of traditional American art. Their subject matter was entirely abstract,
their scale was huge, and their iconoclastic production method became
almost as important as the works themselves. This was because, for these
Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity of a painting lay in its directness
and immediacy of expression: in how the artist conveyed his inner impulses,
his unconscious being. In a sense, the painting itself became an event,
a drama of self-revelation. Hence the term "action painting".

An important feature of this "event"
was the "all-over" or shapeless character of the paintings.
Pollock's works in particular seemed to flow beyond the canvas, being
cut off only by the physical limits of the canvas edges.

In short, Pollock (and others) jettisoned
all the traditional concepts of composition, space, volume and depth,
allowing the flatness of the picture plane to take centre stage. Not surprisingly,
the paintings caused a sensation. The New York Times art critic
John Canaday was highly critical,
but Clement Greenberg proclaimed abstract expressionism in general and
Jackson Pollock in particular, as the epitome of aesthetic value, enthusiastically
supporting Pollock's work on formalistic grounds as the best painting
of its day and the heir to an art tradition - stretching back to the Cubism
of Pablo Picasso, the cube-like pictures of Paul Cézanne and the
Water Lily series of Claude Monet - whose defining characteristic is the
making of marks on a flat surface. Harold Rosenberg highlighted the "existential"
nature of Pollock's work, stating that "what was to go on the canvas
was not a picture but an event".

Although Willem
De Kooning is also grouped with Pollock in the highly charged
active type of Abstract Expressionism, his works are different both technically
and aesthetically to those of the latter. His violent and sinister Woman
series of six paintings (1950-3), portraying a three-quarter-length female
figure, exemplified his figurative style, although he also produced more
abstract works. See also his earlier masterpiece, Seated
Woman (1944, Metropolitan Museum of Art), a prototype for the
Woman series. Like Pollock, De Kooning was a strong believer in
the idea that an artist acted out his inner impulses, and that something
of his emotion or state of mind could be read by the viewer in the resulting
paint marks. "I paint this way because I can keep putting more and
more things into it  drama, anger, pain, love... through your eyes
it again becomes an emotion or an idea."

Other important contributors to action
painting include: Mark Tobey
noted for his White Writing style of calligraphic gesturalism; Franz
Kline, an artist whose works include colour field compositions
as well as vigorous gestural work, sometimes compared to gigantically
enlarged fragments of Chinese calligraphy); Robert
Motherwell (in his series entitled Elegy to the Spanish Republic,
and his powerful black and white paintings); Cy
Twombly (in his gestural works based on calligraphic, linear symbols)
and Adolph Gottlieb
(noted for his abstract surrealist series including Pictographs,
Imaginary Landscapes and Bursts).

Artists associated with the technique of
action-painting continue to be highly sought-after by collectors. Both
Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning feature in the world's Top
10 Most Expensive Paintings.

Colour Field
Painting

Evolving slightly later than action-painting
was a second style of Abstract Expressionism, which became known as Colour
Field Painting. (An offshoot of this style was Josef Albers' Homage
to the Square series.) It emerged as several important artists in
America in the late 1940s and 1950s (eg. Mark Rothko, Clyfford Stills,
Barnett Newman) were experimenting with the use of flat areas or fields
of colour to induce contemplation in the viewer - even to a pitch of mystic
intensity. They were very much on the passive wing of the Abstract Expressionist
movement, in contrast to the agitation of Pollock or De Kooning, though
it is hard to draw a definitive dividing line. Clyfford Stills' work,
for example, can be thunderous in mood but is positively severe in contrast
with Pollock's action. The work of these artists was on a very large scale,
in which it differed sharply from the related investigations of Albers
and others, the scale being necessary to the creation of the effect.

The impulse behind Colour Field painting
was reflective and cerebral, characterized by simple pictorial imagery
designed to create emotional impact. Rothko and Newman, among others,
described their desire to achieve the "sublime" rather than
the "beautiful." A type of highly coloured minimalism, their
style (according to Newman) aimed to liberate the artist from "all
constraints of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have
been the devices of Western European painting." Rothko's own soft-edged
rectangular shapes of glowing colour sought to envelop the viewer and
trigger a semi-religious emotional experience, to the point of tears.
Like Pollock and the action-painters, colour field paintings were executed
on a monumental scale for optimum impact - not to invoke heroic grandeur
but rather to influence and create an intimate relationship with the individual
spectator. Rothko said, "I paint big to be intimate."

The most distinguished of these colour-field
painters was Mark Rothko.
He has been described, along with Clyfford Still as the chief exponent
of the "American Sublime". He first showed in 1929 and by about
1940 was working in a Surrealistic vein. By 1947, however, he was evolving
the formula to which he was to remain faithful for the rest of his life.
This formula, though generally interpreted on a monumental scale is almost
as simple as Josef Albers' square. Mark
Rothko's paintings typically comprise two or three horizontal or vertical
rectangles of different colours, varying in width or in height, on an
even coloured background. The rectangles are filled with colour, which
is washed or stained with shifting tones and luminous intensities, and
their edges blur into soft-focus. This blurring of edges makes the colour
seem to float. So powerful and intense is the impression of mysterious
radiance flooding from these great canvases, that viewers themselves can
also experience a floating sensation.

Clyfford
Still, always a detached figure, also worked on a very large scale.
His signature style being a heavily impastoed,
jagged form, silhouetted in dramatic contrast against a broad, even plane
of colour.

Barnett
Newman, associated with Rothko and Motherwell in the founding
of an Art School on 8th Avenue, New York in 1947, worked for a time on
the magazine The Tiger's Eye, which voiced the opinion of many
of the group. In his mature work he arrived at even more simplified solutions
than Rothko and was never influenced by the gestural painting of Pollock.
In his formula, however, the mystical aim is distilled down to the sparsest
symbolic geometry, involving a rectangular canvas featuring an area of
colour divided by one or more vertical stripes. His work is unimpassioned
in character and essentially cool.

Other Colour Field artists included William
Baziotes, who was close in mood both to Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman,
except he developed a style that verged on the figurative as theirs' never
did. His paintings contain relatively complex shapes suggestive of animate
or inanimate forms; Philip
Guston (1913-80), who had his own highly personal variation, sometimes
called "Abstract Impressionism", from which he moved on to a
more expressive style in the late 1950s; Adolf Gottlieb, a close contemporary
of Clyfford Stills, exploited Surrealist imagery in the 1930s but was
also deeply interested in American
Indian Art and from this he developed in the 1940s his so-called "Pictographs"
characterised by very Freudian imagery. Another important figure in the
development of Colour Field painting was Helen
Frankenthaler (b.1928), who began as a Cubist before exploring
Abstract Expressionist styles in the early 1950s, making a significant
development of Pollock's "drip" technique.

An offshoot of Colour Field art which explored
harmony and proportion in Abstract Expressionism, was developed by the
German painter Josef Albers,
from 1933 a teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In his
teaching he investigated the relations between geometry and colour in
a series of paintings, entitled Variations on a Theme. After moving
to Yale in 1950, he began his sequence called Homage to the Square.
This massive body of work consisted of hundreds of paintings and prints
all within a square format. Though they vary in size they all feature
three or four squares superimposed - a nest of squares positioned with
vertical but not horizontal symmetry. Albers used the formula to demonstrate
his abiding belief in an essential dichotomy of art - "the discrepancy
between physical fact and physic effect" - thus the linear structure
of his square pictures is of the most simple clarity. The colour structure
is created likewise in evenly applied paint, straight from the tube. The
colour of each of the three or four squares usually has no variation of
intensity, and so is completely inexpressive of any quality other than
it's particular tone. In the eyes of the onlooker, the flat picture plane
becomes three-dimensional as one colour seems to advance, another to recede,
according to its contrasting nature. Furthermore, the pure evenness of
colour within each square is affected optically by its reaction to its
neighbours, and all the colours change in character as the light in which
they are seen, changes.

Some art critics have compared Albers'
Homage to the Square series to Claude Monet's famous Water Lily
paintings, except Albers' heirs were the Americans of the late 1950s and
1960s who, while respecting the Abstract Expressionism achievement, found
in his work a pattern and an intense colour sensation on which they could
build. Later again, his interest in perception became relevant for Op
Art and even Conceptual Art.

The first generation of Abstract Expressionist
artists flourished between 1943 and the mid-1950s. They had a major impact
on the reputation of American painting, leading to the establishment of
New York as the centre of world art. The style was introduced to Paris
in the 1950s by Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002),
who received great assistance from Michel Tapié's seminal book,
Un Art Autre (1952). Michel Tapié also promoted the works
of Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann in Europe. At the same time, new American
sub-movements like Hard-edge painting
appeared, exemplified by artists like Ad
Reinhardt (1913-67), Frank
Stella (b.1936), Jules Olitski (b.1922) and Al Held (b.1928).
In Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, abstract expressionism was known
as Art Informel (art without
form). Sub-variants of Art Informel included: Tachisme
(c.1945-60), marked by the irregular use of splotches of colour. Exponents
included artists like Jean Fautrier (1898-1964), Georges
Mathieu (1921-2012), Maria
Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-92), Pierre
Soulages (b.1919), and the American artist Sam
Francis (1923-94). Closely related to tachisme is Lyrical
Abstraction, a softer type of abstract painting, that eliminated
some of the more subjective elements of Art Informel - a style
exemplified by Nicolas
de Stael (1914-1955), Jean
Paul Riopelle (1923-2002) and the colourist Patrick
Heron (1920-99). See also: COBRA
group. The term Lyrical Abstraction was also employed in America
during the early 1960s, to refer to a purely abstract style of Colour
Field painting which appeared in works by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris
Louis (1912-62), Kenneth
Noland (b.1924) and others. It dispensed with the emotional, or
religious content of the earlier style of Abstract Expressionism, as well
as the highly personal or gestural application associated with it. In
1964, the art critic Clement Greenberg curated an influential exhibition
("Post-Painterly Abstraction")
of works by 31 artists associated with this development at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. The show subsequently travelled to important art
museums across America. Meanwhile in Britain during the 1960s, a new variant
of Colour Field painting appeared in works by Robyn Denny, John Hoyland,
Richard Smith and others.

By the 1960s, the main effects of Abstract
Expressionism had been thoroughly absorbed, although its themes and techniques
continued to influence later artists from a variety of different schools,
including Op Art, Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism,
Post-Minimalism, Neo-Expressionism,
and others.